Gunslinger Girl: My Name is Legion
by RJ Frazer
Summary: "...for we are many." It is formed from hundreds, but a raging mob can move with terrible purpose and fearful will, easily bent to dark purposes with the dilution of responsibility.  When such a giant tramples the streets, what strength can overcome it?
1. Chapter 1

GUNSLINGER GIRL

"_My Name is Legion"_

_By_

_Robert Frazer_

* * *

><p>"All parties without exception, when they seek for power, are varieties of absolutism"<p>

-Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

* * *

><p>Guihono is a middling town in north-eastern Piedmont that you can find upon a broad steppe of land as the Lepontine Alps lap and fold down into smooth green foothills. While really of no great size, Guihono still struggles to puff up its girth, inching out and wriggling every finger of street to cover the whole of the broad terrace where half a dozen streams babble down from the higher valleys and pool together. The river is invisible, though, muffled by a blanket of grey slate and red brick; you can only espy a long line of jet, a damp trickle following the runnel of the grouting, which from the air would be no different from the asphalt roads running along and over it.<p>

It might only be a peculiar trick of light and perspective from that photograph that the _comune _council has posted up on its website, but you cannot help but see – with a bit of the tip of the head and half an ounce of poetry – that the buildings of the town seem all to look uphill. It is as if the gaze of Guihono's citizens snag on the fast flow of the straightened river running through it, and are spun round, unbalanced, to face back upstream; there, they see the glittering sapphire threads of streams, the brightness of the energy that so moved them, highlighting the contours of the mountains above – and they resent it.

Those mountains do not so much tower over Guihono as an act of conscious will, rather exist in a fundamental set state of grandeur. Looming intimidation could be easily dispelled, countered by plucky determination, dogged defiance and other common platitudes; but the mountains are a print of quiet, unreachable grace, painted on the ceiling of the sky, and people can only paw towards them as they would wave vaguely at the clouds beneath Heaven. Most would be content to leave something at such a long distance – because it is certainly nowhere near in _this _Italy – as an idle fancy, but Guihono has the dubious distinction of being half a head over the crowd – not high enough to gain any new perspective, but enough for it to be noticed above the parapet. The town is too low for a ski resort and well off the tourist trails, but still close enough to the A4 to send quarrystone and light machined goods to Milan and Turin. Guihono is isolated enough to have established a firm local identity, but close enough to neighbours to feel the need to assert it; high enough to look down on towns in the Po valley, but low enough to feel drowned in the long shadow of the Alps above it; falling into the gulf between the heady cosmopolitan beat of the plains cities and the calm stature and continuity of the mountain towns. Guihono's civic identity has an itch, but not the means to scratch it, and so it can only try to elbow its neighbours aside and make room.

True enough, braced with the clear mountain air, Guihono has a well-deserved reputation for sporting endeavour. Endeavour as opposed to success, it must be said, because the local soccer team can't boast much in the way of silverware – but it's not the winning it's the taking part the counts, right?

* * *

><p>Clara yelped as another face crashed against the screen of her shield, the flat head of a sledgehammer studded with blazing eyes and gnashing teeth. The furious roar of distended rage slapped around her shield from the impact, washing over the edge and drenching her in the anger of the crowd – she would have screamed and scrambled back, bodily flung by the weight of the emotional wave, but the interlocking shields of the other riot police on either side of her cuffed her to the line, so that she only felt the clenching pain of tension and resistance.<p>

_Soccer games are foci for localist sentiment. This frequently assumes a political character which, fuelled by post-match drinking, comes to be expressed violently. _

Her shield was scuffed, scratched and starred into a grey mist by half-bricks and bottles. It shielded her from the sight of the broiling mass of the mob further down the street, limbs moving in and out of the shadow of the mucky yellow sodium street lights like tongues of flame pushing through the choking smoke of a fire on the horizon, but the blistering fury churning in the crowd still burst with missiles that speckled her with the sting of hot ash.

_Representations have been made for Guihono's matches to either be relocated or to have spectators banned from the grounds, but these have been dismissed by FIGC as impractical to organise. _

If anything, Clara's fogged shield made things worse, smearing the mass of rioters into one congealed, swollen monster that could lurch forward without warning, its awful, broken visage of a hundred ill-fitting bodies bursting through the mist with crushing, rolling girth. Hands and fingers, faces and teeth, all swamped her vision, writhing with frustrated force against the shield, painting it with sweat and blood.

_The Guihono _comune _council has refused to alter the alcohol licensing for shops and tavernas in the town, describing such proposals as misdirected and excessively punitive on fair and open business, instead criticising the police for their lacklustre inability to maintain order. _

Repeating her briefing in her head didn't help settle her, it only added yet another voice to stir and froth the incoherent clamour further still. The police were shouting, the mob was bawling, and it was all noise – each yell and scream another blow beating her senseless, regardless of the angle that it came from. She wasn't part of a rigid line penning the riot in – she was just another molecule in the mass, a tiny little thing yawing violently one way or the other to the vagaries of invisible, anonymous forces.

_Intense policing in other _comunes_ has prevented disorder from being spread during away games, but unless this is handled with comparably final action in Guihono itself it will only result in the amplification of frustration. _

Molecules can be swept away by more powerful interactions, too. Clara lurched unsteadily, caught off-balance as the police line trotted forward, removing the interlocking pressure from her neighbours' riot shields. The muddy whorls of dark colour that churned into a suffocating sludge ahead of her were bridged by a wall of blue and white advancing ahead of her, before everything became fogged as it advanced beyond the sight of her scratched helmet's faceplate. The relief overwhelmed her, a surge of liberated euphoria blossoming out where the press of bodies around her had formerly hemmed it in, pushing away the noises, and the voices shouting at her to move forward and close the gap, in a serene pool – one which darker figures began wading through, mind-blinding rage making them lope through with a hunched gait as they slopped through back into sight.

_All law enforcement officers are now required to attend compulsory crowd control training before graduation._

Clara's trauma was not extended further by having to respond to the broken line. Everything streaked into an indistinct blur as her head whipped from side to side, needing to focus on advancing rioters but too fearful to allow her eyes to settle on one. When something snatched at her shield, it was a clarifying help – she had to pull back away from it. When there was pressure against her nightstick, to let go of it was a relieving release of weight.

Then, the concrete block heaved off the roof of the building beside Clara cracked her helmet like an egg, pulped her skull like a fruit, smashed the sight out of her eyes and spared her from witnessing any more.

* * *

><p>It wasn't the first dead body that Marcel Lehman, provincial Chief of the National Police, had seen in his life. That had been a trip to the city mortuary at the age of sixteen – as work experience went, he supposed it was more instructive than a week making coffee and clearing boxes out of the back-room. It wasn't even the first policeman that he'd seen dead - that had been a principled officer of the law at Lehman's precinct who declined the Mafia's backhander and received the gratitude of the city for his incorruptibility, in a solemn ceremony held a few days after he had been given another free gift of thirty-seven stab wounds. It wasn't even the first woman that he'd seen dead – that had been a suicide after a messy divorce, with young children and money involved.<p>

Even so, back once again in the provincial mortuary, this body, over all the others, affected him.

Woman Police Constable Clara Lamio, a fresh-faced female not yet twenty-five, now would never be. Lehman, himself well into his fifties, imagined that he could say some words about eternal youth, maintained in the perpetual summer of her loveliest bloom, a warm flower that now would never wilt – but when the colour had been leached from her pallid face, one that he could still pick out from the memory of last year's passing-out parade, and matted her auburn hair into a black sludge, the cant seemed particularly pathetic, the meagre token of consolation, a thin paper chit whose value was not worth the effort of going out to redeem it.

Lehman glanced away from Clara's face, his eyes moving to the tray beside her head. Her helmet rested on it – it was something already scuffed and dinted from substantial use, and several shards of the cracked lid were arranged into neat rows beside it in almost apologetic tidiness, a belated gesture of presentability that was consciously futile, but the mere fact of its effort helped to distract from and blunt the edge of tragedy.

There was a shifting fold of cloth behind the helmet, and Lehman followed the movement, his eyes tracking upwards to the diener, the mortuary technician who had been there to greet him when he arrived in Novara earlier that night. He was relatively younger than Lehman, in his mid-forties, and thin with a bald crown and greying hair at his sides coating his cheeks and jawbone with a thin beard. He wore a green apron over office clothes, and square-rimmed glasses – the bright lights of the mortuary's examination room reflected off of the lenses so Lehman could not discern anything from the diener's eyes.

The diener looked over at Lehman from across the other side of the trolley on which Clara had been laid. "The pathologist won't be here until the morning so there's been no autopsy yet, but while I can't give you a certificate to prove it I can reassure you that there's no other conclusion than massive cranial trauma. If she was not killed outright she would have been rendered unconscious immediately. There would have been no pain." He paused for a moment. "That's a consolation." He added helpfully.

Lehman wondered whether the diener's measured and slow tone of ennui was an attempt at genuine calming sympathy clumsily executed due to the social maladjustment of his ghoulish profession, or a drip of mordant humour, for the very same reason. Either way, Lehman did not want to deal with him at this hour... or in this situation.

"Can you please leave the room for a while? I have to make a few phone calls."

The diener shook his head slowly and gravely. "I beg your pardon, sir, but regulations state that I must remain with an exposed body at all times, to prevent interference with the cadaver."

Lehman scowled. "I'm not a suspect trying to pour acid over fingerprints!" He snapped hotly. "I'm the Chief of Police!"

"Then you will understand the importance of abiding by the regulations that you actively oversee, sir." The diener was unmoved.

"I also oversee your salary review." Lehman intoned darkly.

The diener emitted a long, reedy sigh, as a drowned corpse might when releasing its gas. "Be that as it may, sir, it remains that case that we are in the basement of a stone building with a lot of metal and mechanical equipment in close proximity. You will not be able to find a signal down here."

Lehman twitched, struggling to resist the reflexive instinct to check the bars on his mobile. "Isn't there a landline?"

The diener nodded gravely, as if he was acknowledging the tearful confession of a serial killer. "There is a telephone over there," he pointed to a bulky beige plastic device mounted on the wall at the end of a rank of cupboards, "but it is for internal calls; it only connects to the front desk, the head technician's office, the rear delivery entrance, and the galley."

_If it can't serve my purposes, why did you even bother mentioning it? _Lehman fumed inwardly. The diener's imperturbable manner projected a mask of outward deference, but beneath it Lehman was sure that he was snickering gleefully. It seemed that, appropriately enough for someone who laboured in the cellars, the diener could only undermine others. Lehman was already off-put by the whole miserable episode and however desensitised the diener might be, to play his games while there was a body cold on the table beneath him went beyond crassness. Lehman was sorely tempted to slap the diener with a summons to a discipline tribunal right then and there – that might tease out a more direct reaction from the odious cur. He hadn't done anything overtly insubordinate, though and as ever it was the curse of the police to be bestowed with great power, but to be bound from using it.

Lehman blinked. He reached down and gripped Clara's trolley, momentarily dizzied by the liberating burst of clarity escaping him. Something seemed to vibrate in him, concentrated like wind whistling through a hollow cut in a rock, providing sight to the other side. He pawed along the bar at the trolley's edge until its corner turned him away from Clara's body, leaving him facing the double doors leading up to outside.

"Sir?" For the first time a high note of consternation interrupted the diener's studiedly neutral middle ranges.

"That will be all, thank you. Please prepare W.P.C. Lamio's body for the pathologist." The rubber draught-seals of the doors were already wheezing shut behind Lehman.

The street outside the indistinct concrete block of the mortuary was fading out of shadow, with the sky painted a violet watercolour by the dawn, dripping colour down onto the kerbs by the road and across the roofs of the surrounding buildings. The air was cold but slowly warming as the day stirred, giving it a cool, smooth texture that wafted past Lehman's cheeks and slipped down his throat easily, like a bolt of silk.

As Lehman walked over to his car, a patch of dye dropped into the pool of ink that was the wall of the building opposite, spreading like a film until it had filled out the silhouette of a man clad in a thick fleece and a woollen hat as though it was the dead of winter. His breath misted in front of him, but that was only because he was so overheated already.

"Chief Constable Lehman? Aggio Montere, _Alpine Intelligencer._ Do you have any comment about last night's events?"

"I will be making a public statement some point this afternoon – the time has yet to be determined. Further information will be supplied to the press associations later this morning." Having already resolved upon a course, Lehman replied to the buzzing intrusion quite calmly and politely, with an ease that surprised even himself. For his part, the journalist nodded and stepped back, accepting that he was already casting a very long line being the lone figure hoping for a scoop outside the mortuary, and understanding that he was not likely to get more given the circumstances.

As Lehman drove off, he reached across into the glove compartment of his vehicle and pulled out a cheap mobile phone that had been confiscated off of an arrested mugger about six months ago. While waiting at a traffic light he dialled a number from memory, and turned away from the road to Guihono's central police station to amble around residential roads while he made the call.

"...who the fuck is this? It's five-fucking-thirty!" a groggy voice groaned, breathing heavily into the receiver, after the phone rang for a good half a minute.

"Early to bed, early to rise, Costanzo." Lehman spoke with a private smirk.

"Aw shit, Marc—uh, Guiseppe." The voice became distant for a moment. "Sorry, honey, business. Do you mind-? OK, OK, I'll do it in the hall..." More rustling. "Alright, Guiseppe. What have I done wrong _now_?"

"Well, there's the matter that you've been underreporting the number of migrant workers on your gangmasters' books for three years now, and you have as many as sixteen crammed into each house, which I'm not sure abides by local fire safety ordinances."

"Great, I guess that you want _money_ for that now?" Costanzo spoke with a tired sigh.

"You besmirch my integrity, Costanzo. I make it a point of pride that I have never taken a bribe in my life." Lehman pronounced airily.

"No, you just exact tribute in kind instead of cash. How medieval." Costanzo muttered.

"And as lord of the manor, _noblesse oblige _leaves me dedicated to the protection of my tenants and clients," Lehman was unfazed by the criticism, "and indeed, that's why I'm calling."

"Oh?" Costanzo's curiosity was piqued.

"Do you know that the Piedmont regional parliament is planning to pass a resolution demanding that migrant workers are paid the national minimum wage?" Lehman changed tack abruptly.

"Eh?" Costanzo was baffled at the seemingly unrelated question. "Yeah, of course I know about it – fucking Reds, ideologues would rather us go out of business and put _everyone_ out of work than yield one fucking point."

"Actually, it's a right-wing initiative." Lehman nodded his head knowledgeably, even though there was only an empty road in front of him with no-one to see the gesture. "The logic being that if the mud-slimes are no longer cheaper, you'll pack them off back to Albania and help redress Italian unemployment instead."

"Then they're fucking idiots too." With what Lehman knew of Costanzo, all the swearing only meant that he started the day as he meant to carry on. "_Italians _go and get pissed in the taverna once the weekend comes. That's no good to me when peas have to be picked within two days before they spoil. Maybe the Albanians all look like they've been smacked in the face with a shovel and they talk like fucking Neanderthals, but at least I can rely on them to get up in the morning."

"At least you're helping to redeem the Italian reputation with your alertness at this early hour." Lehman said dryly. "Either way, it's coming – so how would you like an opportunity to trim your wage bill?"

Costanzo was quiet for a moment. "Go on."

* * *

><p>It came to pass that the National Police received a tip from a proven and reliable informant about a Padanian active-service cell preparing a major operation in the Novaran town of Guihono. The provincial commissioner, Marcel Lehman, protested that he lacked the resources for his DIGOS antiterrorism detachment to properly investigate this concern, and so referred it to other security forces. After a moment's shocked bewilderment that anyone would ever pass up an opportunity to claw a juicy honour to his breast, the Carabinieri, the Finance Guard, and AISI fell over each other to take charge of the investigation. Even the National Forestry Department submitted a proposal on the basis that its officers were underemployed and could support observations. Multiple counter-claims only proved that each organisation would need to transport staff from other regions to establish a taskforce, an implausible proposition in a north that was increasingly fractious and suspicious of outsiders, and so the gem slipped through all of their clutching and grasping fingers to land in the relaxed, open palm of Section One (Public Safety) of the Social Welfare Agency.<p>

Section One spent a fortnight tugging at leads and seeing what they tripped up, establishing a pattern of Padanian movements, and that they indicated that the threat was credible and imminent. After Section One submitted their observational report, there came the matter of arranging an operational response. The Tuscania Regiment immediately volunteered but their involvement was vetoed by the Cabinet, still leery of what people would infer from involving uniformed military units in a situation that they had for years officially dismissed as mere 'criminal enterprise'. If the Tuscania Regiment couldn't claim the laurel, then there was no chance that it would let the pipsqueaks in its little brother, the GIS, dash forward from between its legs; Tuscania's colonel invited several Piedmontese parliamentary representatives to a social function and impressed on them, after their judgement was suitably clouded by a few bottles of rosé, that black helicopters lurking over their constituencies would create dread and anxiety and dissatisfaction and lost votes in an election year. AISI was unwilling to risk exposing its field agents with an action yet was willing to dispatch a private posse to despatch the threat, but cooled on the idea when the Director of the Bank of Italy stressed that he wouldn't release emergency funds to pay for the attack. Strangely APTI didn't have this problem, but nonetheless they submitted no plan – scuttlebutt that the Finance Guard had received a notification from the Mafia through the Carabinieri's ROS that becoming _too _active would result in an incinerator meeting some of the paper trailing the crucial Neroglotti Family prosecution were strenuously denied. NOCS, the National Police's SWAT unit, would have stepped forward to fill the gap but a health and safety risk assessment concluded that there was a chance that they might experience combat; that would entail an unacceptable risk of injury or use of their weapons.

So that was how Guihono came to be visited by a detachment from Section Two (Special Operations) of the Social Welfare Agency.

* * *

><p>Michele remembered one time that he had been skiing. A cable-car sat at an intermediate station would take skiers up to the very top of the mountain, but the attendants manning it would only set it in motion when the gondola was full to capacity. This left him, his then-girlfriend, and a clutch of other skiers all huddling together like penguins in a high wind on the station's exposed metal gantry when the lower lifts had developed technical faults, stopping other people from coming up to meet them. They all resented the attendant, who was probably power-tripping out of jealousy considering his own experience of Alpine splendour amounted to pressing the 'GO' button once every ten minutes or so, but they were too conditioned by social deference to uniforms and stupefied by leisure to have the wit to do more than grumble about it. As he glanced again through his binoculars at the town-house that the Padanian cell had occupied, Michele felt something of a similar sentiment stirring in his breast. The peak, and the prize, extended out before him in impressive array, but he could only bat his hand emptily at a flat and unreachable backdrop until other factors manoeuvred to propel him there.<p>

Luckily enough, this time they did. Michele watched the front door of the town-house click shut, like the turnstile at the base of the cable-car. "That's the last of them" he spoke into his walkie-talkie. "I can confirm that all of the cell members have entered the target building."

The operation moving forward another step towards initiation was celebrated with a sudden chorus: "_From the dark end of the street, to the bright side of the road, we'll be lovers once again, on the bright side of the road..._"

Michele turned back from the window to discover the source of the noise. Most of the handlers were seated around the table, absorbed in a card game (and from their studied expressions it looked as though they wanted to finish the round before they were called to muster) and Brian was stood facing the wall adjusting the straps on his ballistic vest, standing beside the rank of the handlers' weapons which were laid out on a cloth sheet against the skirting board. Avise was laid out fully on the room's settee, his head against one of the armrests while his shoeless feet dangled over the other, ankles rotating in a swaying beat as he sang to himself.

"_Into this life we're born, baby sometimes, sometimes we don't know why, and it all goes by so fast, in the twinkling of an eye..."_

"You seem very... _insouciant_, Mancini." Michele observed.

"_We'll be lovers once a-_hahahaha_!" _Avise laughed, not getting up but craning his neck around on the armrest to catch Michele in the corner of his eye. "You were a military man yourself, Pagani, you know how to mix the nine-to-one boredom cocktail. There are only so many interminable hours before missions that you can spend sternly-set in sombre solemnity, fixing your steely glare into the middle distance pond'ring the irresistible hand of fate and the artful mysteries of man's inhumanity to man, before you run out of platitudes to make you feel smart."

"True enough." Michele shrugged in a philosophical concession. He'd seen fellow aviators taking books and crossword puzzles into the cockpit with them for dull cruises on autopilot.

Avise continued to burble contentedly to himself. "_Let's enjoy it while we can, won't you help me sing my song, from the dark end of the street, to the bright side of the road..."_

Brian curled his lip in quiet appreciation as he caught the tail of the tune. He was pleased that one of his own local heroes had still got soul, but was still surprised at who it resonated with. "I didn't ever plan that that you could be a fan of Van the Man," Brian said as he turned around, "I thought you hated British stuff."

Avise didn't reply immediately, deciding whether or not Brian was casting an aspersion on his character, but settled on him simply being interested in his musical tastes. "Okay, so he sings in English, but Van Morrison is Irish, though."

"_Northern_ Irish," Brian corrected him, "he's from Belfast."

Avise pouted, sour that something he enjoyed was being tainted by association with the tea-drinking pinkie-extended lordy-marms. "Well, that's pretty much Irish. It's even in the name."

Brian physically winced at his partner's insensitivity, especially when it was that exact sort of airy generalisation which contributed to the war with Padania in the first place. "...if you say so." He managed, diplomatically.

Avise did not start singing again, and instead pulled a cigarette out of his pocket and struck up a match to light it. The actinic blue haze of his smoke had just started to bruise the ceiling when Ferro entered the room.

"Hey, Marlboro Man," Ferro called out to Avise with uncharacteristic easy lightness, "time to put your shoes on." Ferro's gaze turned away from Avise hurriedly sucking down the rest of his cigarette and ranged out across the rest of the room as she raised the walkie-talkie in her hand, suddenly becoming more serious. "I have just had word from Petrushka that the alpha team are ready to move up to their start lines." – Michele hadn't heard this because alternate transmissions played on different channels to confuse snoopers – "Once Giada has finished setting up on the roof, and McDonnell joins Allison and the gamma team, we will initiate the operation."

* * *

><p>The Section Two presence in Guihono was split between two separate buildings – the handlers and the reserve line of cyborgs were based in the observational position across the street from the Padanian safehouse, but the trio of Petrushka, Kara and Agapita who formed the direct assault unit were positioned in the next block, in a structure that looked over to a rear corner of the safe-house. All three were currently waiting for the attack order in a dimly-lit stairway leading up to the flat roof of their building; each felt the narrow passageway and wondered if this was the atmosphere of a trench before the big push. It felt quite good – the light was soft, the air was warm, the atmosphere was soothing, and the route was direct and clear.<p>

The thought of the approaching battle brought another concern to Kara's mind, and she turned to look down the stairs to Agapita, who was bringing up the rear. As they had had to move around in public to reach their start line, all three of the cyborgs were dressed in ordinary street clothes. Agapita was wearing a light pastel-yellow tube top which clung to her tightly underneath her bare arms (augmented by Agapita's dark shooting gloves), running down to her waist where it contrasted with a deep burgundy short skirt with thick, ruffled pleats so that it looked almost like a rah-rah skirt that a cheerleader might wear. Between the two was a broad brown belt of soft leather, fastened with a silver-coloured buckle; she had threaded several webbing pouches through the belt, and as incongruous a feature you might have thought that they would be, their drab olive colour was actually complementary and fitting with the rest of the ensemble. Agapita had mussed up her normally straight hair, and while she had slipped on a pair of black pumps for the mission, some heeled sandals were waiting underneath a chair in a downstairs room.

"Are you sure that's suitable, Aggie?" Kara ventured.

Agapita looked down and plucked a finger at the elastic of her tube top. "Daniel in the den of the lions, Kara. He wasn't exactly clad in full plate there, either."

He wasn't exactly clad in a kinetic-dispersal gel layer that protected (inedible) polymer-filament muscles either, but Kara didn't press the issue. Feeling a surge of womanly compassion for her sister-cyborg, Kara shook her head sadly. "No, Aggie, I don't mean it that way." Kara stepped towards the perplexed cyborg and put her arm around her shoulder, turning Agapita around and leading her further down towards the stairs. It was only a gesture at privacy – Petrushka's cyborg ears would have heard them even at a whisper – but Kara trusted that the gesture would be understood and honoured. She leant her and Agapita's heads together and discreetly softened the blow with a low, almost sub-vocalised whisper. "Aggie," she began, gently but seriously, "I'm very sorry, but... your bust is really the wrong size to carry off a tube-top well. They're great with a large chest or no chest, but you, erm... fall between two stools. The tightness of the material doesn't give them better shape, it really just presses them down further and deforms them."

"Oh." Agapita seemed a little... perturbed. "Thank you for the, er, correction."

Being able to offer advice on something she did know about helped to fill Kara's confidence, and lead her on towards handling something that she didn't, and the real reason for speaking to Agapita. Kara licked her lips, which felt suddenly dry. "Listen, Agapita... how do you do it?"

"Do what?" Agapita, already put off-balance by Kara's revelations, couldn't see where her sister-cyborg was leading, and so was effectively hooked into continuing the conversation.

The arm around Agapita's shoulders tightened around the back of her neck as Kara became more urgent and insistent. "This. Right here and now."

"What – fight? That's our purpose." Agapita couldn't conceive of anything different. Her life was neatly encapsulated in the statement. "It's our advantage as cyborgs, a blessing really. Everyone sets out to enjoy the gifts they're given in life, but even if our lives are shorter we have the added motivation that lifts us up above sole indulgence and fulfils us with greater duty—"

"No, Agapita!" Kara hissed urgently. She was conditioned too, she understood fully the principles of justification, but her problem was more singular, a sharper, stabbing pain. "This mission. We live for our handlers, to support and defend them, but here we're being deliberately separated from them." The times when she'd been apart from Michele were alarming, a spinning knot of bewildering vertigo, like something had been removed from her body - a sudden shift of weight that threw her completely off-balance and incapable of remaining upright "How can you _stand _it?"

Agapita was solemnly quiet for a moment. "It's important for strategic development that the second generation demonstrate their ability to operate without close supervision." She then recited authoritatively, before leaning in closer for some more personal detail. "I overheard Mister Croce complaining once that Rico was useless on her own, that even doing a circuit of a hotel got her into trouble." A beat passed. "I thought it was unkind." She remembered to add, apologetically, as the compulsion to assert a generational strength in pursuit of an objective muddied the waters of empathy.

Kara looked pained by Agapita's answer. She _knew _that, she had been given the briefing as well, but she _still _felt ill at ease. What was Agapita's secret? _Why wasn't she sharing?_ "But what do _you_ think?" The whisper now grated harshly with a hostile, demanding growl.

Agapita blinked for a moment, struck by Kara's undisguised exasperation with her. It was part of a cyborg's programming to push back against aggression, and as Kara was a friend Agapita turned it into a question instead of a fist. "Do you trust Mr. Pagani, Kara?"

"Of course I do."

"I trust my handler, too. Absolutely. He told me something when I was first starting out, and it's true. I know that he can't look me in the eye if he's watching my back, but more importantly, if he could only depend on me conditionally, only if he was constantly chivvying me along as a voice in my ear, I wouldn't be fulfilling my total dedication to him – I would be inadequate. Besides," Agapita's hand drifted across to brush the round-beaded wooden bracelet and its small cross around her wrist, "Just because you can't see something doesn't mean that it's not there."

* * *

><p>(Continued)<p> 


	2. Chapter 2

The Padanian safe-house wasn't the tallest building in the surrounding block – the rebels ought to sack their estate agent – but they compensated for their lack of vantage by ensuring that the roof was constantly patrolled. Being a residential area, no weapons were on display, but the unzipped duffel-bags lying between the two guards keeping an eye on the sky from their deckchairs, and by the foot of the third guard pattering cigarette-ash down into the alleyway around the side of the building, provided easy access to arms.

Giada was squatting down in front of a laptop that her handler had set up at the far side of the roof of the Agency's observation building, observing the three Padanians and assessing their positions out of their sight through a webcam that Section One had installed during their investigation phase some days ago. She was holding up her TAC-15 crossbow vertically beside her as she studied the image – killing three enemies in close proximity without raising the alarm was a tall order, but she had the means to achieve it. With Rico and Melanie beside her, all three guards could be eliminated in one conjoined strike – but the reports from their rifles would have alerted their comrades below and begun the real battle too early. Her quieter crossbow might only give her a second's advantage before the Padanian's felt the impact – but races can be won by shavings of fractions.

Satisfied that she had every target clearly marked in her mind, she hefted up the TAC-15, nocked a cyanide-tipped bolt to the groove, and firmly walked to the roof-edge and fired immediately, plunging a bolt into the base of the throat of one of the Padanians with a fleshy thud. He didn't even so much as gag or gurgle – his head merely tipped down as though he had dozed off, lulled by the heat of the day.

Normally it would take time to crank a crossbow's cable to firing tension, but Giada's cyborg strength could yank the wire back into position with a single tug. The Padanian's companion turned his head toward his fellow sun-lounger – with the body slumped into the curve of the deckchair, it took a moment for him to recognise the protruding quarrel, and another moment to realise its import – but his cry of alarm only emerged as a thick, greasy, rancid burble of frothing vomit as another payload of cyanide was dumped directly into his stomach. The third roof guard didn't even claim the moral victory of seeing where his death was coming from – looking out over the edge and leisurely drawing on a cigarette, enjoying the skipping ruffle of wind skidding across the roof-tops and the sensation on his shoulders of the softened sun filtered through his shirt, he only realised that he was dead when he tried to raise his hand to his mouth for another breath and discovered that his arm was instead spasming in a different direction.

Giada felt the gentle, softly affectionate kiss of a sigh of wind brush against her cheeks and lips as the crossbow wire snapped forward. She watched a feathery tuft catch on the fabric of the guard's shirt around his kidney, like a dandelion seed carried there by the light of spring, and then followed the arc his centre of mass described as he slowly sagged to the floor, slowly lowering himself into a yielding easy-chair.

"Zero, Beta One. Three tangos down. Roof clear." Giada spoke into her earpiece.

"Alpha All, Zero. Start." Ferro's clipped voice was as precise as the sine-waves quivering through the air.

"Zero, Alpha One. Confirmed. Commencing action!" Petrushka's words leapt in pitch as she was already bursting into daylight and arcing across the gap separating the two buildings, Kara and Agapita forming a pennon behind her. The three clapped firmly down onto the flat roof, scuttled apart to quickly slash the throats of each of the fallen roof-guards as a precautionary measure, then snapped back into a line as they shuffled through the roof door and down the stairwell into the building. Giada's crossbow sniping had already bought the alpha team several yard of uncontested advance, and the building itself afforded them a couple more – the stairs leading up to the roof were separated from the upper floor corridor by another door, designed to prevent draughts but which also helpfully offered further concealment. Petrushka looked as though she was prepared to not so much enter stage right as to tear apart the tormentor, winding up to batter through the door, but her grand entrance was put on hold by an urgent squeeze on her arm from Kara. Suitably chagrined, Petrushka moderated her showmanship and opened the door more gently.

"Down already, Kreshnik? Told you that you needed suntan lotion on a day like tod—_eh_?"

Well, she'd tried. Petrushka kicked the door open fully, her Spectre submachine gun already blazing. The Padanian standing in the corridor convulsed as he was riddled with bullets, his coffee-cup exploding in his hand while his limbs jerked and twisted in a spastic chorea, capering down the length of the corridor like a demented puppet with a drunken master, before splaying out on the floor in a tangled mound as life's strings were cut. Kara moved to one side of her – while a normal human would spray wildly as his weapon bucked on full-auto, a cyborg had the strength to keep her aim locked firmly in place, so she was not risking crossing a line of fire – and sliced a shorter burst of rounds along the wall with her P90, chopping through someone who was trying to leap back into the room but hadn't quite cleared the line of the threshold of one of the four large rooms that quartered the upper floor. Kara and Petrushka moved left and right, slipping along the walls to the nearest door, while Agapita ran between them towards the other end of the building.

Petrushka reached the doorway of her designated room just as a Padanian was trying to push it shut – another kick banged in back open and sent him stumbling backward with a scalded yelp, while the last few rounds in her magazine carried him further to the far wall. The flailing body obstructed his comrades' fire just long enough for Petrushka to quickly scan the room, before she ducked back outside to reload as the retaliatory barrage chewed away at the frame and crumpled the door to matchwood. The room was apparently a weapons workshop, so she couldn't rely on enthusiastic amateurs exhausting their ammunition in a timely manner – not that it mattered. Petrushka flexed her knees and span round low across the doorframe, firing off a burst at shin height, and then sprang back the other way at full height and blurring speed, launching another burst – as soon as she landed she used her momentum to pirouette round back to the other side of the frame, a wavy stance that it was difficult to focus on, and blurted another burst to take down her fourth target. She then hopped down into a prone position and leaned her upper body around the ragged frame to cut down the last man who was trying to blindside her by moving up to the near wall.

Kara whipped quickly around her open door, but positioned her body so that it snapped forward off-centre – the shotgun blast that would have pasted her face instead blew a hot, muggy breath past her ear and crunched into the wall in the other side of the corridor. Kara fired immediately, her shots tearing up the mattress of the cot that the Padanian was leaning on for support, the floating tufts obscuring the unsightly mess the rest of the rounds made of his face. A few shots ricocheted off the metal frame of the bed, producing a pained yell deeper into the room as one rebounding round bit into the thigh of a second Padanian, bringing him down onto one knee and knocking off his aim so that his own shotgun blast gouged a long runnel out of the wall by the door instead of swatting away Kara's jaw. Kara stepped into the room and shredded the Padanian with the rest of her magazine before he could fumble a firmer grip on his weapon.

This room was a dormitory, and a door towards one end suggested a private bathroom for a time when this was a large bedchamber rather than being crammed with cots. Quickly ducking down to make sure that no-one was hiding under the beds, Kara moved across the room and but her back to the wall beside the bathroom door and then reached an arm back from outside the frame to test the handle, finding it to be locked. Someone was hiding in there, but because a spray of reactive snap-fire hadn't perforated the door while she was rattling the knob, Kara judged that the occupant was grateful to be on a toilet in this situation. Kara was a proper lady and she didn't really relish the prospect of entering the bathroom and being forced to confront a compromised enemy struggling to control his... effects. She contented herself with punching a hole through the bathroom door and posting a grenade through it – Section One volunteered for post-operation cleanup, dealing with the plumbing would justify their paycheques.

As Kara was arming her grenade, Agapita paced towards the end of the corridor and the front of the building. She smoothly swept around to cover the staircase as she passed it, rattling off a burst of shots to menace anyone coming up the stairwell – she did not hit anyone, but the stone chips flung from the rounds drilling into the wall caused someone mounting the first flight to yelp in pain and tumble down over himself with a crash of floorboards. While the enemy on the ground floor were still recoiling, she flicked a grenade over the banister to rend a ragged hole through the wooden stairs, bleeding dust and splinters, to cut off reinforcements from assisting their comrades upstairs. The blast also washed up to the large bay window overlooking the staircase and shattered its glass in a crashing cacophony of spinning shards, and Agapita used the horrendous din to disguise her reloading (she had only fired a few shots, but a full magazine was ready for any threat) and her footfalls across the bare floorboards of the corridor, bursting into the third room before anyone could detect her approach. It was some sort of living room for the Padanians to use during downtime, and two of the enemy were tipping over a couch and throwing card tables into a corner of the room to use as a final redoubt – as Agapita kicked the door-lock so hard it was ripped from the frame and shattered against the far wall, they both vaulted behind the safety of their cover like yelping, scalded dogs. The thick upholstery and wooden frames of the furniture would have been decent protection against grenade shrapnel, and maybe the bee-stings of pistol rounds; they had less to offer against an assault rifle's full thirty-round magazine at a range of barely twenty feet. Agapita could not see exactly what was happening to the bodies in the blender of bullets and churning timber crushed into the corner, but there were occasional wet tongues of red licking up the walls.

Agapita reloaded her SA80 as she stepped into the middle of the room.

* * *

><p>While the Agency had not cleared the street before commencing the operation – a risky strategy and perhaps reckless public endangerment, but one which helped to limit signs of their presence to the Padanian lookouts – the residents of Guihono knew enough from their regular clashes with the police that while the teams were large, mass-rioting was not a spectator sport, and to keep their heads down when reports started sounding. The street was empty of bystanders, which was an encouragement for the five Padanians who fled from the descending tread of the battle on the storey above to run out of the front door – no visible cordon meant that it would be easier to move then if they were penned into a narrow alley at the back of the building, waiting for a car to pull up at one end and turn it into a fun day out at the shooting lanes. The best of a bad job is still inferior, though – and an empty street just offered a clearer field of fire for the Agency.<p>

Giada waited until three Padanians had dripped out of the front door, dribbling to and pressing themselves against parked cars in an attempt to find cover, before she engaged them – she didn't want to turn the taps off too early when the Padanians could drain more into the killing field. As two more Padanians hesitated on the threshold, she fired – her TAC-15's underslung grenade launcher punching a shell between the pair and burying it into the porch that they were just leaving behind as they stepped down onto the street. The blast swept them up into a grey cloud, spinning them within a tight twister of shrapnel and stone chips until they had unravelled into wavering streaks of glistering gore slopped across the middle of the road.

As hot stones stung the air around the three other Padanians, one of them was knocked off his feet by the buffeting blast – and it also knocked askew his self-preservation, as he immediately bounced up and risked a dash across the road to his car on the far side. However, Amelia had already booby-trapped the vehicle the night before - one small pre-adolescent girl being able to move around street lights and crawl under the chassis more discreetly – and putting the key in the lock only sprung it; with a smoky, dirty, sooty flash the door was blasted off its hinges, propelling the hapless Padanian back across the road to a spine- and skull-shattering impact against the kerb.

The two remaining Padanians, squatting down by the wheels of another car, exchanged a desperate, strained glance. If they had held each other's gazes, they would have been focused on their bodies and the lives contained within them, and might have surrendered – but as one shifted onto his knees, the connection was broken, and their eyes moved to the world and objects around them, which returned no thoughts and could only be reacted to.

One of the Padanians shot through the door lock of the car they were sheltering behind and leant into the footwell, wrenching at cables and trying to hotwire the vehicle, while his companion risked jumping up and scooting around to the passenger side, jerking his body around and pipping single shots from his submachine gun at random angles like a defective lawn-sprinkler. The Agency adults in the observation room instinctively flinched and ducked as one of the shots shattered the thin window and burst a puff of plaster from the ceiling, but Avise scrambled across the carpet to snatch up his AR 70/90 and launched himself at the conveniently-opened portal, using the wall itself as a brake as he brought the rifle to his shoulder and blatted retaliatory fire down at the two surviving Padanians. His haste to fire and the time needed for his eyes to process the street and the location of the target however meant that his aim was slack, and four bursts of rounds only divoted the asphalt around the shooter. The Padanian swung round in a rising shout as he now had an enemy to focus on, but by this time Avise had centred himself and his fifth burst took his target in the chest. An armoured vest stopped the bullets, but their kinetic impact was still enough to squeeze a strained squawk out of the Padanian and knock him off-balance against the body of the that car his partner was still desperately struggling with; the rocking moment of recovery was all the opening Giada needed to spear him through the side of the neck with another unerring bolt – the angle of the roof meant that it couldn't quite be considered to have come from heaven, but as a general working principle it was close enough.

"A bit enthusiastic, Mancini." Michele grimaced from the floor, taking his hands off his ears as the rifle's deafening reports faded from the walls.

"No more than what I said earlier." Avise lowered his rifle as the last Padanian lurched away in an ungainly waddle of a car in the wrong gear, turning coughing, wrenching near-stalls into frantic, panicked shaking to dislodge the driver's companion, who was pulled along for fifty yards before the bolt pinning him to the car's frame snapped. Brian and Allison ought to be given a chance to contribute.

"I don't follow." Michele looked dubious as he pushed himself up from the floor along with the other handlers and support staff.

"Really? You asked me about it yourself." Avise turned back into the room. "At different times you may have to be serene or be stern, and we're proven and experienced enough to understand what situation calls for what."

The lone Padanian didn't get any further than the end of the street. As soon as he reached the junction a Delta Integrale swung out of a side-street and brushed the other car with the faintest feather-kiss. Allison's angle was immaculate – _give me a lever, and I will move the world_ – and as the Integrale rocked to a stop with scarcely a scuffed bumper, the Padanian's car cartwheeled madly into a wall, its driver flung out of his broken door. For a drifting, mesmeric second they floated in synchornic awe, before the Padanian was mangled against a lamp-post.

* * *

><p>Agim was fortunate that the ferocious, pummelling racket of the reports from Agapita's rifle in confined quarters drowned out his terrified whimper. He was cringing inside a wardrobe in the living room – he had been putting a coat back on its hanger and when the first shots had been fired he'd leaped into it and plastered himself against the rear wall like a sprinter from his starting blocks. Now, through the thin, tight threads of light between the slats of the wardrobe door, a smeary black column obscured its way across his vision. It broadened in breaths, each expansion across his vision a blackened blur of fading sight – the creaks on the floorboards the turning of a vice's screw around his neck.<p>

But then, with the clatter of an empty magazine being discarded, the vice's handle broke.

Agim had joined this operation out of moral desperation. His half-brother had helped to establish a new republic in Kosovo, and a second cousin was laying the foundations of Greater Albania with a band of guerrillas in the hills of Macedonia, but all he had done to serve his nation's cause was pick strawberries in the service of the old imperial occupier, who should have been hated and confounded at every turn; the pay-packet he sent home to his elderly mother in did not enrich the nation when it exacted an unequal loss of dignity and pride. Agim had entertained an indulgent delusion that he could add a sinew to Albania's strength – but with a flash of Providence, maybe it was _actually true._ The panickingly warm and clammy grip of the pistol slipping through his hands froze coldly and firmly solid. With a wrench of his thigh and a wordless yell he kicked the wardrobe door open.

Agim shot Agapita five times.

Agapita shot Agim once.

* * *

><p>Petrushka waited for the sound of the last report to artfully echo away. "Hallway clear! Rear North clear!" She then barked out, throwing her stage voice with such modulated ease that she seemed to speak not from her mouth, but from every wall.<p>

"Rear South clear! Bathroom clear! Near enough!" Kara's voice was more muffled, but it was no difficulty for a cyborg to discern.

Agapita turned around, the bare floorboards creaking underfoot, to shout back through the door into the hall. "Stairway clear! Front South cl—"

Front South slammed into Agapita's face as her left foot was swept out from underneath her and pitched her forward onto the floor. She was already rolling to the side as a second shotgun blast heaved up through the floor where her chest would have been if she had stopped to grunt or complain like a mere human. She continued rolling through a blizzard of wood as automatic fire began pecking up through the floorboards, tearing her clothes on jagged-edged bulletholes and convulsing a couple of times like a worm under e bright light as rounds found their mark, before hitting up against the wall and using it to push herself upright, as she could now see that the ball of her left foot had been blown off completely. It granted her a second's respite, as the fire coming from the floor beneath was wild and undirected – the floor was steadily disintegrating, but it was being eaten out from the inside with most shots more central and few reaching the wall that Agapita had pressed herself against. She took a moment to paw the fresh wounds in her chest and groin – unlike the superficial grazes of the earlier Padanian's pistol shots, these were reluctant to clot and seemed pretty deep – and winced as an arc of rounds from a Padanian spinning like a top curved through the floor and drilled a trail that halted little more than a foot from her head.

That clinched it. The room in front of her was dissolving into a fog from the wood burst upwards and the plaster raining downwards, but it was not opaque – in every sharp-edged particle spinning before her she saw moment, observed velocity, calculated angles...

Agapita fired off another full magazine, squirting it in three ten-round bursts. The upcoming fire stopped immediately.

"Clear" Agapita grunted, using the butt of her SA80 as a crutch as she hobbled over to the door and hoped that the floor wouldn't give way underneath her.

* * *

><p>Fabio Amaretti sat in his chair behind the desk in the final chamber of the house, his office, the one that the cyborgs would designate as "Front North". The papers spread across his desk in broad, inviting openness were jostled from their neat, small piles as another explosion shook the building. Fabio grunted in irritation and stretched his fingers out to brush them back into place again, even as the reverberations from a sustained burst of gunfire rattled the lightbulbs in their sockets and made them flicker briefly.<p>

The battle sweeping through the rest of the house got up a tremendous racket – Fabio was too sanguine to elevate the disturbance into a _din_ – throbbing through the floorboards, quaking through the walls, shuddering through the doorframe – but Fabio was quite calm, collected and comfortable, bobbing on a boat of certainty above the noise. He had experienced enough to realise that 'chaos' was a trite and banal term that the unimaginative resorted to when their dull intellects were confounded, like religious mummers who still resorted to miracles over the explanation of science; there was no such thing as chaos, only an order whose sequence had yet to be perceived. Myopic people would have been terrorised by the violence blazing in the neighbouring rooms, stumbling flat-footed and unbalanced and shoved and buffeted from blast to blast, their senses whirling around in panic and confusion – but Fabio had already discerned which route he would be carried on, so why fret?

As a scream splattered against the outside wall and seeped through to his ears Fabio experimented with raising his pistol towards the door a few times, testing the most median and moderate speed of draw and how slackly he could hold it without it slipping through his fingers. He had received very specific instructions, and understood their purpose. Every detail had been organised, everything had been prepared, everyone had been briefed. Operatives these days carried helmet-cameras and he needed to make a small show of defiance so that no questions would be raised by third parties during the debriefing, but he knew that the attackers knew what to do. They would restrain and arrest him, and for his help in corralling a pack of random dregs into a herd large enough to alert state security he would be assigned a place in a comfortable open prison that he could easily slip away from when it suited. 'Budget cuts' would mean that there'd be no great effort to track him down, and there would be a decent fee waiting for him in a Cayman Islands account.

The door in front of him jolted, from a direct strike this time instead of a collateral rattle. Fabio's attention pricked up, and he straightened himself in his chair.

Okay, showtime.

The door shook again, a few slivers of wood splintering around its lock fitting – and then a third time, although it was less a rending convulsion and more a light tremor. A blink of disquiet flickered across Fabio's face as an unguarded voice was audible from the other side of the door.

"_Kara, my arm's a bit iffy, can you break this open for me, please?"_

After a muffled affirmative the door practically jack-knifed into folded halves. The sudden snap of violence flicked Fabio back into readiness, and delivered a figure into the room.

The rehearsals had been valuable. With practised ease, Fabio raised his pistol – just not quite quickly enough to cover the soldier entering the room before he would level his rifle at Fabio – and his grasp was loose enough for his pistol to slip down to the floor in submission, with a smooth, easy, settled immediacy that would not give time for anyone's trigger finger to get twitchy.

Unfortunately for Fabio, his life philosophy was not quite as insightfully unique as his condescending ego pretended. Agapita herself saw a path to navigate through chaos with the paved certainty of the orders that she had received. She had been instructed to eliminate threats. She saw a threat. She eliminated it.

The fist of bullets that slammed into Fabio's chest spun him around in and flung him out of his chair. The last thing he saw before he died was the wall that once was behind him now rushing up to his face.

* * *

><p>"Hallo Zero, this is Alpha One!" Petrushka's voice crackled over the radio. "Building clear!"<p>

Ferro gave an acknowledgement and then lowered the walkie-talkie to address the handlers. "Okay, boys, we're up."

The group thudded heavily down the stairs of the building and jogged out onto the street, their sidearms readied in their hands. Alessandro, in the centre of the line, suddenly tipped to the ground with a yelp, making everyone hurl themselves down for bruising and grazing impacts against the tarmac, expecting incoming fire from a surviving enemy – but Alessandro's immediate stifled, spitting, scathing curses informed the others that he had just slipped on some of the remains of the two Padanians smeared by Giada's grenade strike. A few guffaws slipped out despite the bottling strain of an operation, although everyone picked their way over the ragged crater gouged out of the entryway and filed into the devastated safe-house at a steadier pace.

A thin mist wavered through the air of the house, as smoke seeped down from the upper storey and plaster fell from cracks crazing the walls after the old building had been shaken by multiple grenade blasts. Petrushka was already waiting in the hallway, the barrel of her Spectre smoking after hosing down two enemies who had tried to barrel out of a rear storeroom, but the adults still split up to sweep quickly through the ground floor for any last Padanians hiding in cupboards or pantries, finding none. Ferro and Avise turned together through a wide open arch into the main front parlour – a room covered in a layer of wood and stone, still bleeding dust and splinters from a sagging ceiling torn ragged from the dozens of shots that had ripped through it; under the covering, the three bodies Agapita had rained lead down on looked little different to the cushions thrown off the couches, the pools of blood expanding from them congealed into a brown paste by all of the foreign objects mixing into them. Something shifted in the floor above them, and several brass casings clattered down through a shotgun-hole in the ceiling. Ferro narrowed her eyes into a squint as she tried to peer through the jumbled detritus, and they opened again to take in some documents lying on a side-table against the wall, only discernible as the straight line of a paper edge connecting multiple crazed cracks from the flakes and stones burying it. She crunched over the floor towards the prize, and so didn't notice small patches of colour appear on the body of one of the felled Padanians, dust shaken from his clothes as he scraped an arm towards a discarded pistol.

Two reports rang out, close together, like the left-right jabs of a boxer. Ferro spun round and snapped her handgun's barrel between Avise's eyes.

"Steady on, Milani!" Avise's expression widened in alarm, and he created a curl of smoke as he motioned to the ground with the hot barrel of his revolver. Not removing her weapon, Ferro glanced down and noticed the fresher, brighter, cleaner blood spread on the back of the now-stilled Padanian. She examined the body for a moment, flicked her eyes back up to Avise (looking at the muzzle of her pistol, somewhat baffled), and then down to the body again, before finally putting up her weapon.

"You should have aimed at his arm, or maybe even shot away the weapon that he was reaching for. It would have been useful to have a prisoner to interrogate." She snipped.

Avise furrowed his eyebrows and was about to ask if a little gratitude at having her life saved would be so agonising a concession, but the back-bite died in his throat. As instinctive as his typical tetchy defensiveness was, his conscience stilled it when he understood through her hesitant eyes resting uneasily above the critical bark from her mouth just how crucial authority was to her – not out of proud swagger, but because assertion and influence was crucial to her distinctiveness and thus her fundamental sense of worth. A mask that required constant care through reconfirmation was frail, and a time when the smoke had not even cleared was not the best place to decide to crack it and make her lose face in more ways than one.

Avise settled for a shrug and a "Beg your pardon, Milani." and turned back into the hallway.

* * *

><p>The hallway was steadily filling as the sweep was completed and the adults regrouped around the focus of Petrushka.<p>

"I'm glad to see you're alright, Petra." Alessandro clucked as he brushed wood splinters off of his cyborg's shoulders and thighs without inhibition, meaning it as more than a platitude – perhaps he was projecting his lack of combat experience onto Petrushka, but he had been uncomfortable with Ferro assigning her as the lead and most exposed cyborg in the alpha team.

"Thank you, 'Sandro." Petrushka smiled coyly in appreciation.

"Don't leap headlong into danger, though," Alessandro's voice became chiding, "maybe cyborgs are tougher, but even the crew of a tank don't go out of their way to get rockets slung at them. You were lucky the blast only showered you with this." The handler winced as he picked a splinter out of his thumb.

"Oh, don't worry, this didn't come from a grenade, Sandro!" Petrushka was quick to reassure her handler. "I just jumped down the stairs, that's all."

A tremendous crash suddenly whipped everyone's heads round in that direction. The wooden staircase had been completely gutted, disembowelled by Agapita's earlier grenade, leaving a gaping, ragged cavity – into which Agapita herself had just plunged.

Agapita's bare leg waved uncertainly over the lip of the hole where the first four steps now ended. Avise's eyes widened when he saw the red stain at the top of the white flesh, and he quickly ran around the side of the staircase, scraping to a stumbling stop on the irregular spars and fragments of wood as he beheld his cyborg. Bullet-stings had smudged scabrous brown and red across her bare shoulders and collar, while deeper, broadly-spread patches turned her yellow tube-top black, and it was itself torn ragged to near destruction, nicked by a hundred small slits from rolling across a bullet riddled floor. Her belt, held on only by a few sinewy leather threads after a bullet had torn through it, had snapped in the fall and splayed out underneath her, while a shotgun blast had shaved away most of the front of her skirt and the skin from her thighs in two smartingly red weals. She had a nervous grin.

"Sorry, sir," she began sheepishly, "I think I tore something in the fall. There's a leak in my abdomen."

Avise shook his head and gave a wry chuckle, before squatting down and ruffling Agapita's hair fondly. "Never mind, my dear, it's just your surfeit of glory pouring—ouch." He grunted as he found a wood splinter himself.

Ferro wasn't sure whether to be impressed by Avise's strong rapport with Agapita or appalled at his nonchalant lack of concern for a significantly damaged unit. She settled for gripping Alessandro's arm and hissing at him to fetch the medic.

"Um, excuse me?"

Everyone looked up to see Kara poking her head around the landing.

"Um... I hope everyone won't think too badly of me if I, er... ask for a ladder?"

* * *

><p>"Something's," Alessandro flicked a tongue over his lips as though he tasted the word springing forth, "<em>awry<em>."

Reschligan's face twitched in a brief frown, but he quickly grasped the edges of his mouth and pinned it back to neutrality. He held something of a private antipathy towards Ricci – with his lank body, thin smile, and history of rooting around in Italy's underbelly, Alessandro always conjured up an image of a weasel in Reschligan's mind, and here he was again, ferreting about and scrambling over another of his investigations and batting in his face; however, as prejudicial as Reschligan's sentiments were, he was enough of a professional to not let them rule him: if Alessandro could scurry beneath the detritus of the battle and tease out a new insight, Reschligan was not going to dismiss the prize out of sheer petty pride. After all, to do that would make him even more like Ricci.

"How so?" Reschligan asked, unnecessarily archly.

Alessandro noticed his colleague's self-conceited manner through the inflection of his voice, but decided that he would not let himself be pricked by the barb and instead began stroking his fingers lightly over the papers spread on the table. "Look at these names, for a start. 'Loran Muzaffer'? 'Agim Xhemail'? 'Driton Besmir'?" He then hocked a thumb towards the doorway, through which a Section One photographer recording several of the bodies still flashed – in the instant's glare, a snapping flick of the imagination twisted the pits of bullet-holes traced down the length of the wall and the streaks of arterial spray lashed across it into rust-sharp snakes dripping black venom from their fangs. "Even if they're just aliases, none of the stiffs in there look much like the unblemished shining nurtured strength of realised Alpine manhood, sculpted of arm and proud of brow, do they?"

Reschligan shrugged. "We're pretty sure that they're all Albanians. That's nothing special, though – Padania aren't the only criminals to use illegal immigrants as muscle."

"_Muscle_, though, that's the thing." Alessandro raised a finger to fix the point, which flicked up another irritated scowl from Reschligan. "Most Padanian factions are fascists and they rely heavily on stirring up xenophobia to rally their base. They'll rent a mob from the, aha, 'informal economy' when they need to bulk up with some heavies for a brawl, or a disposable hitman for a scraggy alleyway murder who won't flag up any record on the police database if he gets photographed. That's _all_ they are, though – cannon fodder. 'Why kill the wogs when they're happy killing each other', et-cette-er-_ah_." Alessandro aspirated each syllable in a knowingly exaggerated display, adopting the caricature of an academic reciting the taxonomy of a curious specimen under glass, as if Padania's attitudes were similarly dead and dusty.

Reschligan looked across the left-hand side of the table, where Alessandro's hand rested on top of Agim Xhemail's identity card, to the stacks of planning documentation that they had retrieved from Fabio's office. "I think that I see where you're heading with this. The Five Republics wouldn't bring in a group of foreigners into the central preparation of an offensive operation, would they?"

"Well, we _have_ been damming up Padanian revenue streams recently," Alessandro gave a sardonic smile, "so maybe this is just a particularly entrepreneurial terrorist cell that thought a progressive recruitment policy would win it a subsidy from the Racial Equality Commission."

Reschligan did not laugh. Given the state of vacuous, numb, myopic stupefaction with which the drones maundered through the back-offices of Italian bureaucracy, he could imagine such a thing actually happening. "It's an irregularity, certainly," he kept his manner businesslike, "but not every Padanian group is going to be a model of cool computational analytical objectivity, are they?"

"I wonder about that." Alessandro mused. "After all, the Five Republics weren't forged in the fires of ethnic strife; they're a tax avoidance scheme that's got too convoluted for its own good. I don't know why they just can't register their companies to a mailbox in Lichtenstein like everyone else."

"Their backers, maybe, but not the actual frontline activists, they're as _distinguishing _as Klansmen - you said that yourself." Reschligan rejoindered. "What I'm driving at is, what's the reason for this deviation? I can't perceive—" he checked himself, realising that that wording could be interpreted as his inadequacy rather than the reality of the situation – "There isn't any. If these Albanians were just dupes brought here to bait a trap, why wasn't this building wired to go up like Vesuvius the moment the cyborgs stepped in here? Or why aren't there any cameras live-streaming the Social Welfare Agency's dirty deeds to a Facebook page somewhere? Furthermore, there _was_ a genuine Italian caught in the noose, too. If there was an ulterior motive behind this cell's exposure, why did he let himself be caught in his own trap?" Reschligan tramped his feet up and down; the floor was still covered in a layer of wood splinters and plaster flakes from where Agapita had fired down through the ceiling from the floor above, and it crinkled in emphasis.

"Why are you trying so hard to put down the idea of an 'ulterior motive', Reschligan?" Alessandro frowned. "Teasing out the threads of knotted intrigue _is_ our business, after all. Don't start swinging the lead!"

"There's a difference between insight and paranoia, Ricci," Reschligan brushed off the criticism lightly and adopted a condescendingly patient tone, helping Alessandro with his revision for a refresher test, "you shouldn't miss the wood for the trees."

Alessandro pulled a pleasingly childish face at Reschligan's needling and looked as if he was ready to mutter some juvenile retort, but it turned into a strangled yelp as he spasmed suddenly. Reschligan nearly jumped himself – had Alessandro gone and stuck himself through his soft shoes on a sharp piece of debris? – but as Alessandro cursed under his breath and began shoving hands into his pockets it turned out to only be the unexpectedly powerful throb of his phone vibrating with an incoming message. Reschligan scoffed inwardly at his colleague's discomfiture, and while Alessandro turned away to speak to his caller Reschligan began scrutinising the papers spread out over the table in greater depth.

Even at only a brief, scanning perusal, Reschligan's eyes gleamed with the glint of digging gold. After batting about for so long in foggy clouds of amorphous suppositions and vague conjectures, it was now finally condensing down into something solid, tangible and weighty. Guihono was known in security circles for its surly and obdurate populace, not especially _dangerous_ as such but nonetheless a delinquent nuisance, guilty of frequent low-level public disturbances, which required constant corralling. These papers, though, were a goad to escalate that sullen bolshiness into anarchic rebellion – a detailed plan to perpetrate a massacre during the town's next riot: but not on the public, rather on the police. It was almost chilling in its clinical treatment of atrocity, describing with annotated maps how shooters would infiltrate crowds to enfilade police formations, roadside amenities would be mined prior to a disturbance to disrupt their manoeuvres and break them up down alleyways and side-streets and agitators would rile up the crowd through ringleading antics and faked injuries from 'police brutality' to a foaming fury, surging forward to crush isolated patrols.

Reschligan had done a little of what was so euphemistically termed 'public order maintenance' back when he was a conscript – that had been terrifying, _unmanning_, and the howling, flailing wall that he'd flinched from was formed of friends that he'd been drinking with at the camp's service bar the night before. The suggestion of what vile coil lay curled in people's breasts, to snap out in a whiplash should its restraints ever be even slackened, throttled his heart as it curled tighter within him and crushed his chest – and that had only been a training exercise. To see that box opened, the dread force, the monstrosity of the mob not merely threatened in the black ink of psychology and sociology reports but actually unleashed and unslaked, made his stomach turn. Reschligan was a detective, and it was his profession to be calm and analytical, evaluating movements and motives with a scientist's intellect and perception... but that was a life of the specific and the intensive and the particular. No-one could grasp the whirling madness of a crowd. The demotic demon defied definition.

_My name is Legion; for we are many_.

Reschligan's fingers trembled as he clumsily sorted out the documents back into a pile again. It was as much relief as lingering fear – that the demon would _not_ be rising up, and that these papers were the heavy hammer that would smash it back down under the faceless lake.

"Never mind missing the wood for the trees, I'm walking the path through the forest!"

Reschligan started violently as he was knocked out of his reverie. He whipped around to be confronted by Alessandro's gurning grin. "Did it take you _that long_ to come up with a lame comeback like that?" Reschligan snarled with open hostility.

"Hey, tough crowd." Alessandro lightly brushed off Reschligan's angriness and smiled again as he raised the screen of his iPhone, displaying a mugshot of Fabio. "Let me try a different routine – I have a positive ID on our Italian. Fabio Amaretti, age fifty-seven, formerly 'Generalissimo' of the 'Independent Resistance Organisation for a Free Piedmont'."

"How did you find _that _out?" Reschligan narrowed his eyes in suspicion. "We only arrived here half an hour ago!"

"Section Two's bigger share of the operational budget tells once more, I'm afraid." Alessandro shrugged apologetically. "I took the liberty of borrowing one of your staff's cameras and forwarding the body shots back to HQ. Apparently Claes had a 'software update' during her last conditioning session and the Active Security Concern watching database was uploaded into her – the boffins are testing their memetic recall routines." Alessandro shook his head in wonderment. "Just imagine, thirty years from now you could learn the dictionary just by staring at a screen of squiggly lines for a few minutes. Wonders of modern technology, eh?"

"Is the fact that you're evidently drawing a second paycheque as the Technology Department's head of marketing the only reason for disturbing me?" Reschligan dipped his head to peer at Alessandro from over the rims of his spectacles. Ricci was known for his command of body language, and that message should be clear enough to read.

Alessandro had picked up on his own thread, though, and he was absorbed with following it, ignoring Reschligan's attitude. "But do you know who Fabio Amaretti _is_?"

"Commander of this Padanian cell, you said it yourself." Reschligan waved a hand in irritable dismissal, as though he was batting away a persistent fly.

"Not _this _cell." Alessandro pressed on. "The Independent Resistance-whoevers have been defunct for years, and even this was well beyond them. You see," Alessandro was warming to his theme, enjoying the opportunity to expound his insights, "the thing is that with political certainty, a conviction of both your rightness and righteousness, naturally comes arrogance above the benighted and a sense of superiority; that can reflect off of the ego in a vicious spiral. Fabio Amaretti was no different, an indifferent also-ran with a high opinion of himself. I mean, _Generalissimo_, seriously? His outfit was real 'Judean People's Front' stuff. He fancied carving out his own petty empire in a Turin suburb but they did little more than blow up a few mailboxes; they killed more people in internal feuding than they ever did in actual attacks. And when he had the bright idea to live it large and set up his own protection racket... well, the Mafia tore his merry men to shreds."

"And while he evidently survived that, he'd be a spent force, and his name would be mud. He'd never be able to assemble any serious following again" Reschligan concluded Alessandro's account. Despite his earlier irritation he was naturally interested in investigation and explanation.

Alessandro thrust out his arms to encompass the room, and turned around on the spot to sweep all its evidence and wreckage together. "Hence the question."

Reschligan couldn't help but concede a smile, both in honest admittance of Alessandro breaking a new angle on the case, and in seeing his movement. All that time he spent with his cyborg was evidently rubbing off on him. "Well, Ricci, fair points and well-presented. There is something awry here, indeed. Maybe you ought to use that gadget you're so proud of to ring up Section _One's _communications unit and have them pull up the late Amaretti's phone records."

* * *

><p>(Continued)<p> 


	3. Chapter 3

Avise, leaning on the van's dashboard, signed the form and handed it through the window to the mechanic. "That should be everything."

The mechanic quickly scanned the form with his pencil torch to make sure that all of the boxes were filled, nodded in satisfaction and tore off the carbon copy underneath, passing it back to Avise along with his _Automobile Club d'Italia _membership card. "Very good, sir. Is there anything else I can help you with?"

Avise experimentally pushed down the accelerator, producing a grating rasp from the van's idling engine. "No, I think we're good."

The mechanic smiled and adjusted his cap in an informal salute. "Right then, Mr. Mancini. Safe travels!" The mechanic walked back to his own ACI van and his tail-lights were soon lost in the bright stream of evening traffic. Avise turned to the other passengers of his vehicle – his cyborg, Amadeo and Giorgio from Section Two's support staff, and two other men from Section One's cleanup-crew – who were currently sitting on the grassy verge by the road. "Well, come on then!"

"Not your most auspicious moment, Mancini." Amadeo grinned as he stood up, joshingly elbowing Giorgio beside him. "Weren't you in the Bersaglieri? _Mechanised _infantry?"

"I was an officer," Avise growled testily as he got out of the van, "and that meant that I ordered _you _to do it." He trudged round to the back of the van and pulled out a clothes bag and a groundsheet that the two from Section One were supposed to use in their business. "Come on, Agapita, we may as well take advantage of this – best get changed into our uniforms before we get too close."

Agapita nodded and she and her handler tramped off into the bushes beyond the verge where they laid out the groundsheet and undressed together, stripping down out of their mufti and re-emerging in sharply-cut dark blue National Police uniforms. Despite being transformed into a dignified officer of the Law, Agapita gave a juvenile pout when she saw Giorgio in the van's front passenger seat. "I'm supposed to be in the front."

"Hey now, don't act so spoiled," Giorgio laughed, "and let other people have a turn!"

"But I'm _protection_!" Agapita whinnied pathetically.

"Come on, stop it with the games," Avise groaned tiredly, "this was an... informal leg-stop. We're supposed to be working."

"Okay, okay, don't be a square." Giorgio had enjoyed the self-consciously childish game, short as it was. He didn't exit the van, rather physically clambered over the seats into the back of the cabin. Avise rolled his eyes – although he supposed that he didn't need to worry about morale if his men were so relaxed – as he moved back into the driver's seat, while Agapita happily slid in beside him.

"My phone's in the right pocket of my tunic," he told Agapita as he began to drive, "be a dear and dial Ferro for me, please?"

Agapita's hand nimbly slipped into Avise's jacket and did so, holding it out in her open and upraised palm like a waitress with a tray of canapés. Avise took it with a nod as he heard Ferro's voice emit from it? "Hello?"

"Milani! Mancini here." Avise spoke briskly. "We're on the move again, just leaving Piacenza. We shouldn't have to delay our appointment with Lehman."

"Delightful." Ferro pronounced it as if it was anything but. "In that case, we'll keep this brief – using a mobile phone while driving is banned and incurs a ninety-euro fine, it would harm civic harmony to see a representative of the law violating it."

_Geez, pardon me for ensuring that lines of communication remained open during an operation_, Avise grumbled internally but actually said, "Are there any updates before I go?"

"One thing, actually," Ferro responded, "I have been led to understand that it's important." Ferro kept things businesslike and so you could anticipate that what she chose to say was usually relevant – that she felt the need to qualify the statement showed that it was actually her notion of something fun and frivolous. "I also have a message from Doctor Donato. He says, quote," – and from her tone it genuinely sounded as though Ferro had copied down his words verbatim and was now reading them back from some paper – "I know that your Lord Jingo has difficulty understanding new things after one too many bomb-concussions, but impress it on him, with your boot-heel if you have to, that we are getting close to assigning poor Agapita a permanent bed here. It has been six missions in a row now that she has come back with bits falling off of her, and one of them wasn't even a combat operation. Jesus fuck, even Big Croce takes better care of his cyborg, and Rico has been used as a literal punching bag. Exclamation mark." A beat passed. "Unquote."

"I'll take it under advisement." Avise muttered. He could tell that Ferro wasn't treating Donato's hectoring as anything of significance and was trying, in her own indirect and inexplicit way, to amuse Avise with gossipy shop, blinking through the eyepieces of her outwardly cold mask – that was why it was being brought up over the telephone and not in an office back at the Agency compound – but the fact that someone was complaining about him still rankled. "Thanks anyway, I'll see you later."

Agapita apparently lacked the wit to recognise any implication – or was perceptive enough not to waste energy worrying about hidden meanings when there were none – but in the back seats of the van, the four other men exchanged intrigued glances. _Not just 'Mancini, out?' Ooh-la-la._

The van turned back onto the A1 Autostrade leading north towards Milan, and while the gathering evening promised dusk on the Motorway of the Sun, the lights lining the way would continue to bathe the road in a summer yellow.

* * *

><p>Despite the delay from the van's faulty engine, the Agency detachment did arrive at Lehman's home on the outskirts of Guihono on-time, although some difficulty finding the right junction for the A8 towards Varese meant that Amadeo had to take over the driver's seat for the part of the way and demonstrate some of the Advanced Driving that Avise, used to twenty-ton Dardo APCs, still hadn't quite got the hang of even after over eighteen months in the Agency's employ. They almost were late when Avise insisted on taking the wheel back for the cruise to Guihono.<p>

"I'm supposed to be in charge – I _am_ in charge – and it would look suspicious if I'm not driving." Avise pressed.

"But it's a hassle to move," Amadeo complained, "and I can be your chauffeur if image is an issue."

"Do you _want _to be my chauffeur?" Avise cocked an eyebrow.

"...fair point." Amadeo pulled up and switched seats.

* * *

><p>Lehman's residence was a detached house, not large enough to be considered a villa (and as Lehman had divorced a few years ago, maybe too big for him even now), set in a small plot of land surrounded by a wall; far from a grand estate – he was a policeman, not the Prince of Belmonte – but enough of a green belt to ensure privacy and discretion. It was not an extravagance; it was a feature that served the government's purposes... and in more ways than just protecting him from rebels, too.<p>

Someone carrying a rifle was standing guard at the gate. Under the street lights it was easy to see that he was wearing a policeman's uniform, but as a military man Avise could immediately tell from the gatekeeper's slouched, insouciant posture that he was just a private security guard with a police tunic thrown over his shoulders to keep things official. Italy was notorious for having the highest proportion of law enforcers in Europe, even before the emergence of 'transient irregularities' in the north, but when the pressure to bulk out numbers meant that most recruits were turned out with little more formality than _sturmabteilung _brownshirts, Avise doubted that they provided the most efficient investment of resources, to phrase things most diplomatically. The Garibaldi Brigade had been one of the first to fully professionalise following the liberation of Eastern Europe from the communist yoke, so Avise hadn't often had to control conscripts, but his interactions with them during his early years as an officer – and, indeed, spending over a year with bullets being vaguely slung in his general direction by the bravos and braggodacios of the Five Republics – left him unenthusiastic about the typical citizen's vim and fibre.

The guard did firm up his stance and grip his weapon tightly as the van drew up to the gate. He surveyed the plain white people-carrier a little doubtfully when Avise announced that he was an investigator from DIGOS here to see the chief, but the appointment was in the diary, Avise's police credentials did check out, and privately he was pleased that here was one senior officer who didn't flaunt his salary with a fancy Mercedes when he still had a year of payments left on his Fiat Punto. The gate was cranked open and the van advanced along the paved driveway towards the house.

A second guard answered the front door – he seemed surprised at there being half-a-dozen people waiting on the steps, but there had been no indication that anything else was amiss so he assumed that the others were simply part of the delegation. Avise motioned Amadeo, Giorgio, and the two Section One staff into a front parlour while he and Agapita moved on to the rear of the house and the main living room.

The living room was comfortably furnished, with the walls lined with bookcases with lights on top of them in recessed fittings that lit the room gently, a carved antique-looking bureau and a glass drinks cabinet, with soft leather settees arranged around a glass coffee table. A large set of patio doors led out to the garden, and Marcel Lehman looked out to it. He turned away to face the fratello as they entered the room. Despite the late hour and the fact that the meeting was occurring in his own house, Marcel was dressed in his police uniform as well, although an irritated scratch of his sleeve indicated that he would rather not be. Marcel's handshake was respectfully firm enough as they made their greetings, but his face frowned as he said, "Was it necessary for this meeting to be held at this hour?" Truthfully he was eager and enthusiastic – this is what he had worked towards for months now – but to display that too openly would be suspicious.

Avise suppressed a frown himself. "Chief Lehman, with all due respect, you have been making constant representations to the central directorate to be informed of the findings of the DIGOS investigation at the earliest possibility. We're merely honouring that."

"I'd have settled for first item on the agenda at the morning meeting, but fair enough." Lehman grunted as he eased himself down into a chair. Agapita made to sit on one herself, but moved back a step when Avise shot her a glance. Lehman noticed that with curiosity. Well, maybe they intended to keep things brief. That suited Lehman's purposes – he already knew what results he was going to given, and he already knew exactly what arrangements he would put in place.

"Nice place you have here." Avise offered conversationally, his gaze ranging around the room. "It must be worth a lot."

Or maybe he wasn't keeping it brief, he was a ramrod with a permanent crick in his back. Oh well, never mind. He just had to get through this and then the ball would be rolling. "Don't I know it." Lehman laughed dryly. "I had to remortgage it when my wife absconded. She's living on the Amalfi Coast with the proceeds now."

"Isn't it lonely?" Agapita blurted.

The sudden question caught Lehman flat-footed and he didn't have time to think about whether it was even appropriate or not. "Sorry, uh, what?"

"Being here on your own, without your wife? Without someone with you?" It emerged as an almost plaintive whine.

Lehman's gaze hardened as he processed Agapita's words. He was going to bite out that personal matters were none of the nosy bitch's fucking business, but something about the naked intensity of her piercingly concentrated, painfully desperate stare of earnest entreaty dissolved his anger and prevented him from tightening his jaw into his intended snarl. Instead, words slid out as an abashed, embarrassed laugh and he patted his knees as a form of applause at a good question. "When you're my age, and you're a shrivelled prune with all the juice wrung out of him – like me – that sort of thing loses its lustre. I'm just enjoying my liberation. The reward for long service is release from it."

"Shame that only one of you gets a pension afterwards, though." Avise laughed sardonically. Lehman turned his head to listen to Avise, and as he did so something strange passed across his vision. Agapita had seemed to, well, _shrink_. An anxious expression opened her face, she hunched her shoulders and arms to her body, and twitched away from Lehman, across the room towards Avise. She seemed actively _intimidated_. Curious girl – women were emotional after all. His ex-wife was court proof of that.

"Anyway, you were saying?" Lehman motioned hopefully to the file that Agapita held under her arm.

"Yes." Avise motioned to Agapita again, who extracted a wedge of paper from the file – a copy of the plans discovered in the Guihono safe-house – and placed them down on the coffee table before Lehman. "I regret to say that yes, there has been a plot to perpetrate an atrocity on the citizens of Guihono. We are in the process of shutting it down."

Something in the back of Lehman's mind tripped with disconcertion over the use of the word 'process' – surely it was over, after the bloody confrontation that had wiped out the dumb heavies that Costanzo had rustled up? – but at the fore of consciousness was private pride as he admired the comprehensiveness and quality of his own handiwork. Even though he had been a loyal policeman for decades, he could immediately understand the heady thrill of conspiracy.

"Marcel Lehman. It is a strange name for an Italian, if you don't mind my saying so." Avise made a little small talk as Lehman flicked through the document.

"My grandmother married a Frenchman, and my father comes from Bolzano-Bozen. You know, the German bit of Italy." Lehman murmured. He was unsure why the visitor was asking such a question, which didn't seem to have anything to do with business, but saw no harm in answering.

"Ah! How international!" Avise declared lightly.

"I suppose so." Lehman shrugged.

Avise's gaze hardened suddenly. "Also irredentist."

Lehman blinked, and looked up. "Uh, sorry, what?"

"I spent most of the last few months fighting the Tyrol Bridge-Builders over there." Agapita declared. "It was pretty hot work." She added for emphasis.

"Uh... right." Lehman looked between Avise and Agapita. While he had been reading they had moved several paces apart so that he was now between them. "But I haven't lived there since... Hell, since I was eight, so I'm afraid that I don't keep up on local politics."

"The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, though, as they say." Avise intoned darkly.

Feeling needled by this haughty disdain, Lehman raised his voice suddenly. "Look, what's this got to do with anything? Besides, _who _says? And _what_ makes him right?"

"We say," Agapita announced, not hiding a smile and evidently enjoying the position of confidence, "and this makes it right." She now took the complete file from underneath her arm and flopped it down onto the floor, between Lehman's feet.

Lehman did not react immediately. Trepidation began to condense a lead weight in his stomach, and its heavy inertia rooted him to the spot. Creeping realisation steadily constricted his lungs, sapping the energy to move. After a strain of effort which was as much keeping composure as moving, he bowed his head down before Avise and Agapita, reaching for the file.

It was a plain manila colour and did not have any of the stamps, provenance marks or other identification details that you'd expect to see on an official police document. Instead its title was only printed in regular black type: "SWA.S1 DOC. C541-09 - OP. HEIMDALL POSTOP EVIDENCE COLLECTION."

"Operation Heimdall? Like, the god? Bit extravagant for just mopping up a bunch of low Padanian thugs, huh?" Lehman laughed weakly, trying to make light of it all, in the faint hope that he could just float away.

"It's random, just what the computer spat out, nothing more." Avise and Agapita droned together in a tired toneless unison.

Lehman opened the file. He flicked through several pages of photographs of the aftermath of the battle, many of them images of bodies plastered against walls or splayed out over floors, the gory focus oddly juxtaposed with dry annotations in the margins pointing out identifying marks, like someone inferring a commentary on eighteenth-century mercantilism out of a Jackson Pollock painting. He then came to a page dense with black bars of text. Lehman squinted and stared, and the ink wavered into a statement – from Costanzo.

"He's being arrested for tax evasion," Avise explained, "which is a sight more preferable than aiding and abetting terrorism."

There it was finally. The word.

"If you're here to ask for my advice on sentencing, I can't agree with that," Lehman said carefully, "there is little point to law if we cut deals, people will not show respect for them if they know they are pliable."

Avise brayed a nasty, pummelling laugh. "Ah, _Guiseppe_, that's a legal conundrum that you've obviously considered deeply."

"My name's Marcel, you were asking about it earlier. A bit of a Freudian slip, Mr. Mancini? Is Guiseppe a friend of yours?" Lehman knew that it was a particularly feeble ploy to needle Avise into making a mistake, and it gave him little solace – like how clawing at loose, shifting soil only emphasised that you were sliding into the pit.

Agapita drew her Tanfoglio and levelled it at Lehman. "Now that's just _rude_." She pouted.

The muzzle of Agapita's pistol held the black hole that Lehman had tumbled into, and now he had hit the bottom. A jolt ran through Lehman and spurted energy into his limbs – while he raised one arm in a warding gesture, the other dove into his pocket and activated the personal alarm there.

The wail that erupted from that small plastic capsule was strident, deafening, almost a physical bludgeon that battered you to blindness in the way you squinted and reeled to try and shut it out. It also brought absolutely no assistance from his bodyguards.

Agapita winced, looking pained. "Mister Lehman, can you put that away, please? My ears a bit more sensitive than most."

Thoughtlessly, sightlessly, Lehman did as he was told, retrieving the small white cylinder of the alarm and twisting it shut so that the banshee and her shriek were trapped inside again.

Lehman sat numbly there for a few moments. Another person would be estimating how quickly he could be launching up off the settee to make a grab for the gun, gauging whether the weapon was a bluff and whether they'd shoot or grapple him if he tried to run, or racking his brains for a titbit of intelligence that he could release to help lubricate and loosen the noose. Nothing came to Lehman's mind. He had exercised discretion, used judgement and collected favours over the years, but he had for most of his career been a decent policeman – the conspiracy born out of him had not nested through natural means. All that throbbed in his mind, a series of explosions bursting in his mind through the pressure of his heartbeat, the pulses waves that drowned out all else, was that he had been engaged in criminality; and now, he had been caught.

"Chief Constable of the National Police for the Novara Region, Marcel Lehman," Avise declared, with a baritone intonation the resounded off the walls like a judge confirming the charges, "for several years now you have struggled – and failed – to maintain order in the increasingly fractious town of Guihono. This was brought into relief by the death of Clara Lamio, a policewoman from your force, during a riot there over a month ago – raising an edge that cut into your systematic failure. You arranged a substantial cell of discontents to attract our attention, and deliberately planted evidence there to suggest that they planned to use Guihono's reputation for public disturbances as cover to inflict heavy casualties on the police, knowing that security forces would have to respond to such an obvious group and thus uncover it. You would then use it to rile your own officers up with threat and hostility to the extent that you legitimise gunning down potentially dozens of civilians if anything similar was even vaguely threatened in a future clash – and you would ensure that they would."

"That sounds about right, yes." Lehman croaked like a rusted door being pushed open.

"So, only one question remains," Avise sighed, "why?"

Lehman glanced at Agapita, who continued to cover him steadily with a dispassionate expression. All throughout Avise's statement of the case Lehamn had been sitting there with the personal alarm still cradled in his cupped hands. He now placed it down on the cushion beside him and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and steepling his fingers – concealing his mouth, expression and their cues behind his hands seemed to make things more neutral, objective and definite. When something sinks to the bottom, it will be compacted and concreted, and Lehman the policeman put his case before justice.

"You'll say that it's revenge, a vindictive, wounded indignation, visiting sufferings on my enemies a hundredfold. Or that I've run out of intelligence, and that the only way I can think to make the vile little pukes that populate Guihono - like effluent backdrafting up from the sewers! – not break any more laws is to make them corpses. There's some truth in both of these. But really, truthfully, cutting through to the heart of the matter?

"I'm sick of it. I'm sick of the scrawl on every alley wall. I'm sick of having to tie the shoelaces of half-trained incompetents, just to make up manning numbers that I can never, ever reach. I'm sick of noisy morons ranting on corners and who know _their_ rights, but no-one else's. I'm sick of someone being shot in the spine in a tavern and left in a wheelchair for the rest of his life, while _twenty-eight_ other drinkers were 'using the toilet' while it happened. And, most of all, I'm sick of thirty stabbings, forty bludgeonings and fifty arrests – and bailouts – every fucking Saturday night."

Avise looked away. He leaned forward to grip the back of the settee he was standing by with his hands with a creak of leather. Agapita glanced quickly over at him, worry momentarily twisting her mouth, although her aim remained steady on Lehman. Avise drummed his fingers on the back of the chair for a few moments, marshalling himself, and then he looked up at Lehman.

"Do you know what makes this the worst possible thing?

"I agree with you. I fully empathise with you. I understand your frustration, I feel your bitterness, I know the bite of the wire of impotent rage constricting around you. Everything you have said is something that I would say, and mean - and have said, and done." He looked at Lehman with open, soulful compassion.

"And that's why I know, more than anyone else, that you have to die."

Lehman tried to protest, to speak, to declaim an ultimate pronouncement with the fundamental, instinctual authority that would speak to the reason of every human.

"I did what I had to do." Lehman rasped, in a small voice.

Avise shook his head in sorry agreement. "Don't we all?"

Lehman bowed his head, and exhaled. "Okay, let's get on with it then."

The handler nodded. "Agapita, please take Chief Lehman outside."

"Can't we do it in here? It's warm." It was absurd and indulgent, but as last luxuries went it was hardly much and Lehman figured that there was no harm in asking.

"It'd be inconvenient." Agapita said as she motioned Lehman towards the patio doors with her Tanfoglio pistol. "Indoors would make it an undignified mess to clean up."

"I suppose so." Lehman laughed weakly and stood up with a show of effort. As he reached the doors, though, he stopped.

"One thing." Lehman croaked.

"Go on." Avise said wearily.

"Avise Mancini." Lehman gave the name not so much to address Avise as a statement to the air. "Agapita...?"

"I don't have a surname." Agapita said simply. She did not move from covering Lehman, but having no concern with the almost theatrical finality of the situation and the men's attitudes, her ever-vigilant eyes flicked from side to side in case this was a stalling tactic of some kind.

Lehman didn't react to Agapita's strange admission, and continued, "Are they your real names, or...?"

"Yes, Chief Constable Lehman. They are our real names." Avise nodded. The early sneering and cutting tone with which he had opened the condemnation was in no evidence here, and the answer came with a solemnity that recognised the respect of the gesture.

"I see." Lehman afforded a slow, wan smile. They had given their real names because there was no risk of him telling them to anyone – at least they were honest. "Thank you." He nodded to Agapita. "Both of you."

"It is appreciated." Avise nodded. Lehman then pushed through the patio doors into the garden beyond.

* * *

><p>The patio was a stone square bordered by a small shin-high wall, with the garden lawn extending out on three sides. With the light spilling out from the house affecting his vision, though, everything of the garden beyond the bright square of the patio dissolved into a black curtain, rising up and around him in empty folds until the silhouette of the tree-tops against the sky defined their arc.<p>

_All the world's a stage... _Lehman was never a particularly artistic person, his knowledge limited to a small amount of trivia and aphorisms so that he could pepper conversation with the impression of erudition. Still, here in this _setting_, Lehman was conscious of it being apposite – and his part was inevitable as following the script.

"Move out six paces onto the lawn ahead, and then turn around to face me." Agapita instructed Lehman.

Lehman turned his head and glanced back at Agapita. "Are extra-judicial killings always this formal?"

"I like the occasion of it." Agapita said, a reflective tone entering her voice as her head wandered slightly in thought – but that pistol arm never so much as twitched. "It elevates it. Dignifies it. No effort may be _necessary_, but to exert it anyway ensouls it with conscious human agency. It's not a process, it's a fulfilment."

She'd put some thought into that. "A hitman with a sense of ceremony!" Lehman cried aloud, shaking his head in awed wonderment. "I'm privileged to live in interesting times!" Suddenly feeling bold, Lehman strode out onto the grass. Then he stopped.

Lehman turned around slowly, and locked eyes with Agapita. His face was pulled into a tight grimace of grim satisfaction.

"All flesh is as grass, Agapita."

"Just as well that I don't have any, Chief Constable Lehman."

Agapita hammered a rapid double-tap which punched two rounds through Lehman's forehead, ripping off the top of his head like tearing Velcro as they passed through his skull. Lehman swayed briefly, and then fell backwards, landing heavily on the ground. The thud of him hitting the earth disguised the patter of gristle rustling the lawn.

Agapita remained still for a moment, and then closed her eyes before exhaling slowly. After a moment's reflection she re-holstered her Tanfoglio, turned around and walked back into the light of the living room. "All done, sir!" She said brightly.

Avise smiled warmly, reaching over and giving Agapita's arm a familiar, affectionate squeeze. "Good girl." The fratello moved back into the hallway, where they noticed three rifles propped up against the hat-stand like tightly-folded umbrellas, and the front parlour, where Amadeo and Giorgio had rounded up the three policemen who were Lehman's house-guard. The two support staff leaned against the wall apparently preoccupied with the pattern of the wallpaper. Their submachine guns hung on their lanyards, as they rested their forearms on the tops of the weapons – a deceptively relaxed pose which could slip down the side to the trigger in a frictionless instant. The two Section One wetworkers, already changed into battleship-grey boiler-suits and drab olive wellington boots, were sitting on armchairs in the armchair's bay windows, quietly and unobtrusively clinking through their equipment bags.

If it wasn't for the policemen, you would have doubted that the reports that had cracked out scarcely a minute ago had even been heard. All three men were sitting beside each other on a couch, their hands cuffed behind their backs. Two were continually glancing around them, looking doubtful and uncertain, while the third was simply miserable, his eyes unreadable slits behind puffy swellings that were already buffing up to a brilliant ebony shine that would have been the pride of any parade-ground sergeant-major.

"They doubted the authenticity of our government credentials," Amadeo smiled without prompting, following the fratello's gaze, "so I demonstrated something that a limpid northerner swollen fat by all the green Alpine fields could never hope to manage himself."

"Very good, carry on." Avise said in a businesslike manner, before turning to the pair from Section One. "It's done – go work your magic."

The wetworkers stood up together. One asked, "Can someone bring the stretcher round while we're working? It'll save time."

Avise nodded and fished the van's keys out of his pocket before passing them back to Agapita. "Get on that, will you, my dear?"

Conditioning was designed to let a cyborg follow orders without question and coolly kill the enemy without suffering psychological trauma – it did little to suppress the glint that sparked in Agapita's eyes like the completion of an electrical circuit when the talisman of adult authority clinked in her fingers. She liked the sense of responsibility – it wasn't a desire for independence, more a welcoming of rapport and trust tangibly condensed down into a physical artefact; that it was – however small and outwardly mundane – a token of worth, and thereby fulfilment. As meaningful and affecting as the gesture was for Agapita, though, her reaction was less soulfully awed and more giddily gleeful. She walked to the front door, although that was because layers of deportment protocols were inhibiting her desire to skip.

Avise shook his head with a wry, fatherly smile. "Still like a girl in so many ways."

Amadeo and Giorgio skittered askance glances across each other's line of sight. _'Like a girl'. With his background? How'd _he _ever know? _Practised hands of the Other Ranks as they were, though, any suspicious manner had vanished completely by the time Avise turned around towards them. The handler opened his mouth to speak, but was interrupted when one of the house guards, no longer able to handle the strain, rocked crazily in his seat and blurted in shrill panic, "For God's sake, man! I'm not Padanian! I don't know if the Chief was involved in anything dodgy but I _swear _I'm not!" Avise noted the singular 'I' as opposed to the collective 'we' of his neighbours and tipped his head back slightly. No sense of fraternity there. Was there a reason why? "What do you _want_?" The guard bleated helplessly.

Further investigation could be handled later – for the time being, Avise had more specific needs. He reached into an inner pocket of his jacket – causing instinctive flinches from the policemen who half-expected him to draw a handgun – and pulled out a rounded sheaf of gently-folded papers. He unrolled one to present a pre-prepared witness statement to the speaker. "For now, your signatures."

* * *

><p>The diener had drawn the graveyard shift again, but it didn't trouble him too much. It was an extra bung to his salary, and he was rarely disturbed; people that passed in the dead of night were mostly the ill or elderly and had no need for autopsies, and so were the responsibility of private undertakers rather than the municipal mortuary. It was true that the cloak of night shrouded men's sins, but men who wished not to stumble were only abroad during the day, when they'd discover and report any frozen drunk or bludgeoned victim. All in all, while the cot in the mortuary's bedroom wasn't the most comfortable ever built, a mattress stuffed with money was a delectable downy cushion to recline on.<p>

The diener was too careful in his manner to ever be called smug, but he was undeniably self-assured. It seemed fitting, then, that as soon as he had filed away the last of the night's paperwork and began brewing a coffee, the phone rang.

"Novara Provincial Mortuary. How may I help?" The diener cunningly masked an involuntary sigh by lengthening his words.

"Please prepare to receive a body. We should be arriving in ten minutes." The voice was curt.

"Very well." The diener reached over the desk and pulled out a form from the pigeon-holes mounted above the desk. "Your name and ambulance number, please."

"This is a private vehicle" the voice sounded testy and impatient.

"In the absence of an ambulance code I will take your license plate number instead." The diener actually hadn't meant to say that – even he knew that he could only push his pricking and pointedly deferential bearing so far – but the trouble with wearing a mask for so long is that it sometimes became stuck to your face.

There was silence on the end of the line for a few seconds, and then a murmur of what might have been people conferring. Then a different voice ventured, "CD 472 VA, Roma."

"Thank you." The diener was thanking more than the man on the other end of the line. "Please come straight round to the rear service entrance." The call ended.

The diener thought for a moment, and then craned his neck over to the list of official phone numbers pasted up against the wall. He dialled the direct number for Guihono's National Police precinct.

Even though it was late at night, the response was prompt and the female voice at the end of the line was aware and alert. "Good evening, can I help you?"

"Yes. I'm calling from the public mortuary on Via Giovanni Battista. I've received a suspicious call from people who claim that they're delivering a body, without proper credentials. Could you send someone round to supervise the matter?"

"Ah, we are already aware of this, sir – they telephoned the emergency services first, but the ambulance on hand had to be called to another emergency. Please assist them when they arrive – I appreciate that it's irregular, but tragedy doesn't need to be compounded with confusion."

"I see." The diener acknowledged.

"Thank you for bringing your concerns to our attention anyway. Public vigilance is sadly lacking in this day and age." Claes hung up.

The diener drummed his fingers on the edge of the desk, twisting his mouth into a grimace at the half-finished form beneath him. With a rasping, frustrated, dissatisfied growl of a sigh, he pushed himself up and grabbed his jacket from the coat-stand.

* * *

><p>It was a clear night - even despite the orange loom of the town surrounding the mortuary, bright stars were still visible in the sky above. That also meant that it was bitterly cold. The diener stamped his feet while his fingers squirmed in his jacket pockets, and his breath didn't even have time to fog – the low temperature quickly clamping on the ribbons of condensation and straining them to thready nothings. For a long time the diener had affected a cold manner, but on a night when things seemed to be out of his control Nature had come to remind him of the real thing.<p>

Three periods of 'within ten minutes' had passed before the private vehicle, registration CD 472 VA Roma – a plain and unmarked white Fiat people-carrier with tinted windows – finally rumbled around the tarmac to the mortuary's rear entrance. It reversed to the service door and coughed to a stop, and two men in National Police uniforms got out of the front seats and moved to the rear. The only acknowledgement that the diener received was a curt command from the driver, "Get the elevator ready." The diener complied, although mainly because he had to walk across the back of the van to reach the control box for the service door's shutters, and that let him get a look at what was inside as the two men opened the van's rear doors together. A third man began pushing out a simple metal stretcher bearing a body completely concealed in a thick white shroud, and its handles were grabbed by the front passenger – the diener couldn't determine an exact impression of the man's muscle structure under his uniform, but from the light ease with which he hefted the stretcher up – which could be a lot heavier than people realised, even without a twelve-stone cadaver atop it – he could guess that none of the people here were office workers, to put it mildly. There were more people in the back of the van, but he was prevented from discerning detail as the driver shut the doors smartly once the two stretcher-bearers and their load had cleared it.

The elevator to the mortuary basement was a metal case, as were all of its fittings. Nothing could simply shut – the door and its frame gnashed together with a rattling crash that stabbed into your ears shook the fillings in your teeth; even the three other men in the compartment flinched as the diener heaved the grille across. The descent button did not click but _thunked _as it was depressed, as if something had been dropped onto it from height, and the cable growled like a chainsaw as it ran through the pulleys lowering the elevator compartment down – not the most auspicious of allusions seeing as bodies were hacked up for autopsy on the floor below. Oddly though, this discordant cacophony was actually somewhat soothing – it actually made the handling of bodies easier, as the complete lack of conscious regard for decorum or awkward inarticulate stumbling around what might constitute respect deflated the elephant in the room; everyone's eyes turned up to the grinding and chewing above them, not the shroud at their feet.

As soon as the elevator finally clunked down at the basement, the two stretcher-bearers immediately squatted down and picked up their load, carrying it past the diener and to the closest of the long room's examination tables. The diener circled around them to the far side of the table, while the driver went around the other end to brush up against the diener's side. The diener jolted from the contact and turned round quickly to face the driver, but he was silent, only holding an expectant look on his face.

The diener suspected that this was a deliberate ploy to keep him off-balance and not give him the ability to sink and brood on the irregular activity of the night. The diener suppressed a scowl – he had spent many years carefully cultivating a calm persona behind which his private derisions could play freely, and he was not about to let some interloper's swagger bash against and crack it. The diener turned away and began pulling the shroud back from the cadaver's face.

His resolution promptly failed as he lurched back from the excavated skull of Marcel Lehman.

"He died of a brain haemorrhage." Avise explained breezily, while reaching past the diener and placing his government credentials on top of Lehman's chest. "It's very tragic, how all of our grand plans and lofty ambitions can be undermined by such a miniscule flaw that it is impossible to seal. Ah well – when God wants you, he'll take you."

"A brain haemorrhage." The diener repeated, as much to steady himself as to confirm Avise's requirements. He looked down to Lehman's body, the jagged-edged cavity carving out his cranium, and the oozy dribbles of gore clinging to the side of his head like gelatine. "That is true."

**THE END**


End file.
